Hellenic Diaspora – Studies in honour of Michael Damanakis

This collective volume describes themes related to Hellenic (Greek and Cypriot) Diaspora and is dedicated to the university teacher and researcher, Professor Michael Damanakis, who introduced intercultural education to Hellenic Diaspora as a subject of teaching, learning, and research. The Hellenic Diaspora, it is scientifically assented, is, historically and experientially, the oldest, systemic expatriation among the nations that lived on our planet. For about 3000 years, a large part of Hellenes (many estimate that it constitutes 40% of the total population of seventeen million Greeks) lived and developed an Outer Greece. For the Greeks of the Diaspora, Hellas is not just a nation-state, but constitutes an ideological entity, a sensation, a set of values and a way of life. This ideological and diachronic dimensions of the multiple variations of Hellenicity and its principles, have resulted in the preservation of ethnic and cultural identity and the development and cultivation of an interactive Hellenicity by expatriates and non-Greek-background Philhellenes in all neighbourhoods of the world, through all aspects of education and Greek culture, mainly the Greek language, literature, philosophy, history, music, performing and interpretive arts. Expatriated Hellenism possesses capabilities, hands out priorities and visions, displays courageous morale, however, is also characterised by its limitations. It often faces a crisis in its communication with the Greek and Cypriot institutions and regularly discerns the disparaging symptoms of the endemic pathogenesis of this crisis. However, it resists and advances. Expatriate Hellenism and its institutions in the Diaspora are recipients of very serious socio-economic and political influences, dangerous mutations, provocative differentiations and pressures, which put to constant test the cultural physiognomy and ethnolinguistic identity of millions of people, who trace their origin back to Hellas and to the Greeks. In recent years, the forms and structures of the Hellenic community organisations in the Diaspora, the way they survive and the method of networking their human resources have been profoundly affected. The methods of resistance against their ethnolinguistic assimilation are being modified, the strategies of reaction against their cultural leveling are being revised, new ways are being
formed. The modern effects of globalized economics and politics, globalized television, the telecommunication revolution and the attempted globalization of cultures, the onslaught of artificial intelligence, profoundly, negatively and positively, affect the behaviour, form and structure of Greek and Cypriot communities in their countries of settlement.